How to get the Most out of your Digital Agency Relationship

Real success - real transformation - often starts with a willing attitude about investing time up-front to shape the right solution instead of too much focus on short-term tactical items. Engaging in meaningful discussions up-front doesn’t mean that we can’t tackle tactical items, but it does mean that we have the opportunity to share our experience in the industry and with other clients to ensure that clients understand the totality of what can move the business forward. 

Read the rest of my blog at Rightpoint -->

Practical Applications of Augmented and Virtual Reality

The early 1990s saw the rise of a lot of buzz around the topic of computer-generated virtual reality. Like many other ideas of the time, the concept was far ahead of the technology's ability to deliver and there were limited practical applications of Augmented and Virtual Reality. After some amusing movies and video games, virtual reality (VR) faded from the public's consciousness. But the core concept - being able to instantly create any kind of world and to actually participate in it - persisted.

Almost 30 years later, virtual reality is back and this time, it's ready for prime time. 

Read the rest of my blog at Rightpoint -->

Observations from the Episerver Ascend Conference

Anyone currently invested in, or seriously considering the Episerver platform, has plenty of reasons for optimism about the future. The Rightpoint team and I attended this year’s Episerver Ascend customer conference in Las Vegas, and were constantly impressed by the continued evolution of the platform and the innovation being crafted by Episerver, the partner community and Episerver customers around the world.

Read the rest of my post at Rightpoint...

Five Things I Can’t Wait to See at this Year’s Episerver Ascend Conference

Episerver’s annual Ascend Customer Conference (http://www.episerver.com/ascend) is always an event that I look forward to. Set in the glitz and glamour of the heart of Las Vegas, the Ascend conference is a rare opportunity to meet, interact with and pick the brains of some of the most innovative and talented members of the Episerver community. It’s the best opportunity in North America to find out the future direction of the Episerver platform, to meet with experienced partners and to find out how other customers have innovated using their web site to drive more conversions and sales while improving customer experiences and brand perceptions.

This year’s show promises to be larger than ever before, with more than 30% more attendees expected to join what was already a sizable community. Held again at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, this year’s Ascend Customer Conference has a lot to look forward to. In that spirit, let’s go through the Five Things I Can’t Wait to See at this Year’s Episerver Ascend Conference:

1. Keynote Speakers – Last year’s speakers were phenomenal and would be a tough act for anyone to follow, but Episerver has done an excellent job with this year’s line-up. It starts with Mel Robbins, an award-winning TV host and motivational speaker who will be speaking assisted by the Passing Zone, an American comedy-juggling duo. Joining the conference this year also will be Scott Hanselman, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft is one of the company’s most popular bloggers and web developer personalities. And of course, Episerver’s own James Norwood, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of strategy will be speaking and sharing his vision for the future direction of the Episerver toolset. 
2. Code Bash – This year, Microsoft is sponsoring a Code Bash contest pitting teams of up to 4 developers against one another to come up with fun and exciting new uses for Episerver, coded right there at the show floor. Members of the Ameex team will be participating in the event, but it’s not just for coders. Designers and even businesspeople (gasp!) are highly encouraged to join, as well. Find out more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/episerver-ascend-code-bash-tickets-31152491942 
3. Community Partners – Ascend is special because it’s one of the few places where the entire Episerver community comes together in one location. And it’s an amazing sight to see. This year, the Partner Village this year is closer to the food, which makes it a lot easier to pick up a delicious bite to eat while you also have time to meet with the entire spectrum of Episerver partners, all in one room. It’s fun seeing service partners, implementation companies, design agencies and staffing companies coming together to provide Episerver customers with world-class options.
4. Automated Personalization – To suggest that there is some interest in the ability to deliver completely automated, but fully personalized, experiences may be a bit of an understatement. Thanks to the acquisition of peerius, Episerver can now allow customers to have real-time predictive analytics that leverage machine learning and big data. This allows our customers to get closer to the ultimate online marketing dream: fully-automated, completely individually personalized experiences without resorting to a painful-to-manage list of segmentation rules.
5. YOU!!!! – While we all look forward to having fun, learning and spending time in the sessions, the truth is that seeing YOU is what we are looking forward to the most. It’s the only time we get to meet Episerver customers, partners, trainers, developers and team members together. Learning from one another’s experiences, building new relationships and equipping one another to be more successful, productive and capable than ever before is what it’s all about.

Ameex is extremely proud to sponsor this year’s Ascend Customer Conference and to continue to showcase our experience and talent with the toolset. This year’s show will be even more interesting, as we will be debuting a new product that streamlines and automates the conversion of Ektron web sites into Episerver web sites. Thanks to its dynamic migration features, conversion times are made almost instantaneous, saving tremendous amounts of time and energy without sacrificing quality. Stop by and see us at Table 17 for a demonstration of this interesting new tool. We’d also love the opportunity to speak with you about project development, staff augmentation services or even ongoing maintenance and managed services support.

Contact Ameex

Contact Brian Browning (brian.browning@ameexusa.com or at 804-920-1956) to learn more about how Ameex can assist you in learning more about Episerver development. 

1.               Keynote Speakers – Last year’s speakers were phenomenal and would be a tough act for anyone to follow, but Episerver has done an excellent job with this year’s line-up. It starts with Mel Robbins, an award-winning TV host and motivational speaker who will be speaking assisted by the Passing Zone, an American comedy-juggling duo. Joining the conference this year also will be Scott Hanselman, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft is one of the company’s most popular bloggers and web developer personalities. And of course, Episerver’s own James Norwood, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of strategy will be speaking and sharing his vision for the future direction of the Episerver toolset.

2.               Code Bash – This year, Microsoft is sponsoring a Code Bash contest pitting teams of up to 4 developers against one another to come up with fun and exciting new uses for Episerver, coded right there at the show floor. Members of the Ameex team will be participating in the event, but it’s not just for coders. Designers and even businesspeople (gasp!) are highly encouraged to join, as well. Find out more and get tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/episerver-ascend-code-bash-tickets-31152491942

3.               Community Partners – Ascend is special because it’s one of the few places where the entire Episerver community comes together in one location. And it’s an amazing sight to see. This year, the Partner Village this year is closer to the food, which makes it a lot easier to pick up a delicious bite to eat while you also have time to meet with the entire spectrum of Episerver partners, all in one room. It’s fun seeing service partners, implementation companies, design agencies and staffing companies coming together to provide Episerver customers with world-class options.

4.               Automated Personalization – To suggest that there is some interest in the ability to deliver completely automated, but fully personalized, experiences may be a bit of an understatement. Thanks to the acquisition of peerius, Episerver can now allow customers to have real-time predictive analytics that leverage machine learning and big data. This allows our customers to get closer to the ultimate online marketing dream: fully-automated, completely individually personalized experiences without resorting to a painful-to-manage list of segmentation rules.  

5.               YOU!!!! – While we all look forward to having fun, learning and spending time in the sessions, the truth is that seeing YOU is what we are looking forward to the most. It’s the only time we get to meet Episerver customers, partners, trainers, developers and team members together. Learning from one another’s experiences, building new relationships and equipping one another to be more successful, productive and capable than ever before is what it’s all about. 

Ameex & Episerver: An Expanding Relationship

One of the best ways for Ameex to provide value to our customers is to constantly research the content management system (CMS) marketplace, looking to identify up-and-coming tools, platforms and systems that will allow us to further transform our customer’s businesses.  As part of this ongoing effort, we also take time each year to evaluate our current CMS partners to ensure that we are representing the most powerful and compelling tools available. As we recently completed our wave analysis for the second half of 2016, we found that Episerver continues to distinguish itself as a world-class customer experience platform, building upon its impressive CMS roots to include powerful e-commerce, personalization and search functionality that drives tangible business results.

Thanks to this analysis, Ameex has invested even further in our relationship with Episerver, by expanding our team size and global delivery capabilities. As an Episerver Solution Partner, Ameex has been involved in the Episerver marketplace for several years, most recently having sponsored and attended the Ascend conference in Las Vegas, Nevada last November. Ameex’s ability to provide Episerver resources, support and skills around the world for a very competitive rate structure and extreme flexibility in delivering solutions from project to staff augmentation models helps to distinguish Ameex from other Episerver partners.

One of the most tangible measures of a company’s expertise in a specific technology is to evaluate the number of certified developers onboard the team. For Episerver, we have now expanded to almost 10 fully-certified Episerver developers, more than doubling our count from the beginning of the year. Episerver has a well-deserved reputation for requiring programmers to have hands-on experience prior to taking the certification testing, as the tests are focused on practical applications of Episerver. In other words, Episerver certification testing isn’t the kind of thing that can be obtained by simply reading the manuals.

The Ameex approach to expanding our Episerver certifications is based on leveraging our programming team so that they gain critical skills and experience by developing under senior, certified Episerver developers and architects. Once they achieve enough experience, and once an internal certified Episerver agrees, we submit our programmers for the certification testing process with Episerver. The fact that we have more than doubled the number of certified developers on our team is notable for two reasons. First, it indicates that we see this as a growth area within our business and more importantly, means that customers are also seeing the value in the Episerver platform. Secondly, it demonstrates that we are increasingly becoming more experienced with the platform and have the ability to scale our Episerver team more than ever before.

Finally, it’s hard to argue with actual results - and in this case, Ameex is extremely proud to have launched our third Episerver project this year for one of the world’s leading providers of specialty metals. This client’s web site build included the setup of a third party Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool integrated with Episerver which is now creating and delivering customer leads in a measurable way. In addition to a complete user interface overhaul, responsive design implementation and customized reporting of customer traffic behavior both on and off the main web site, this client’s new Episerver-powered web site is already producing observable business results.

Earlier this year, Ameex also released a new Episerver-powered responsive web site for Neptune Technology Group (https://www.neptunetg.com), a leading provider of AMR/AMI solutions for over 30 million water meters at over 2,500 utilities around the country. Helping them move onto the Episerver platform, Ameex worked to redesign the entirety of their public-facing web site experience, including redesigning the search experience. Ameex also worked with a partner to help one of their customers move from Clickability onto Episerver for both a public web site and employee-facing Intranet project.

At the time of this writing, several new Episerver projects are underway and we see continued interest from our customers in learning how to best utilize Episerver’s powerful capabilities. It’s not surprising to see this level of success when you combine an experienced CMS provider who has flexible, global delivery capabilities with the power of Episerver.

Contact Ameex

Contact Brian Browning (brian.browning@ameexusa.com or at 804-920-1956) to learn more about how Ameex can assist you in learning more about Episerver development.

(Crossposted on Ameexusa.com)